Living Life to the Fullest
I want to thank all of you who have written in with your own stories, and with words of hope and encouragement. A couple of e-mails have stood out in my mind. There was one from a woman who lost her mother to cancer. She remembers that feeling of time — time slipping away, a time limit on life — that is so much a part of the world of cancer.
She said that she and her husband did something unique. They figured out how many weeks it would be until they turned 90. She ordered that number of marbles, and every week, she and her husband move one marble from a vase to a dish.
I have to admit that when I first read that, I thought it was a horrible idea. It was clock-watching taken to the extreme. Just counting down the days and weeks until you die. But then she said that the two of them take that moment as an opportunity to pause and ask if they have lived that week to the best of their abilities. They ask each other what they have done to enjoy that time together.
I think that's brilliant. We all say that we want to live life to the fullest, to make the most of every day we have. But that's not always easy to do. We can get lost in the rush of everyday life, work, schedules, appointments, and all the things that conspire to eat up our days. But this couple takes that one moment each week to stop, take a deep breath, and ask themselves how they have lived. To me, that's not morbid, that's a reaffirmation of life.
I wear a bracelet made up of beads. By coincidence, the number of beads is the same as the number of months that I have been given to live. As each month passes, I look at those beads, and now I'm going to ask myself the same question that woman posed? have I lived life to the best of my ability? Have I tried to make a difference? Have I tried to make this a better world?
I haven't figured out what I'm going to do with the bracelet when I pass that last month. Throw it in the ocean? Start the countdown over again? Get a new one? Or just laugh, take a deep breath, and enjoy that day, and the next one, and the one after that?
I don't feel like the clock is running out for me. The prognoses that doctors give you are notoriously vague. I'm pretty sure that the cancer is going to kill me at some point. But whenever that time comes, whether it's weeks or months or hopefully years, well, I hope that when I ask myself that question one last time: "Have I lived my life to the fullest?" I hope that my answer will be yes.
7:07 AM ET | 07-10-2006 | permalink
